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California Students, Parents Sue Over Teacher Firing, Tenure Rules
The L.A. Times reports that a group of students and parents, fed up with what they see as overarching job security in California schools, are suing in the hopes of making harder for poor teachers to stay on the books. From the article:
"The lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit, advocacy group Students Matter, contends that these education laws are a violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee because they do not ensure that all students have access to an adequate education.
Vergara versus California, filed on behalf of nine students and their families, seeks to revamp a dismissal process that the plaintiffs say is too costly and time consuming, lengthen the time it takes for instructors to gain tenure and dismantle the 'last hired, first fired' policies that fail to consider teacher effectiveness.
The lawsuit aims to protect the rights of students, teachers and school districts against a "gross disparity" in educational opportunity, lawyers for the plaintiffs said." Perhaps related.
By the capitalist wreckers who are trying to smash the unions and destroy public education.
Or do you think all those millionaires like Bill Gates and Obama who send their kids to elite private schools give a shit about public school students?
Ha ha ha ha!
What we need is COMMUNISM. We need a revolutionary workers party!
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While in rare cases job security is a problematic issue due to incompetence (or worse, in extreme cases), stripping away job security typically creates even more, worse problems in the long term with an even faster race-to-the-bottom. If this succeeds, they could find themselves, instead, fighting against the school board hiring cheap, less-competent or less-experienced teachers because they can get rid of the expensive, experienced ones quickly and easily.
Also, teachers are, in most places, unionized (the article doesn't seem to mention if California teachers are or not). Go against the union in such a drastic manner and you may find yourself with a widespread strike on your hands.
The union negotiated contracts are designed this way to protect the union members that have paid the most dues. This is common across the board with union contracts. The unions care about the union members first, then the job itself, even though the individual union members may have different priorities. I'm not saying this is bad or wrong, as looking out for your own is generally a noble thing, but it's something that the courts have supported for forever and it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
However, if it's written into the contract, how can you not honor it. The fault lies with those who agreed to it in the first place, and rather than trying to use the courts to get rid of it (which seems to be becoming more and more common), change the laws or change the contract the next time it's up. Equal protection clause seems like a pretty weak case to me, as the kids could simply be sent to a different school or home schooled. I guess it does serve to put the issue in the spotlight, if nothing else. I had an algebra teacher in high school who was drunk half the time, and when he wasn't he was a grouch and sometimes would snooze during class.
see: Leandro decision in NC. Of equal significance, the Supreme Court ruled that the State of North Carolina, not local school districts, has the ultimate constitutional obligation to actively safeguard and successfully deliver every child's Leandro right. No exceptions. No excuses. link: https://law.duke.edu/childedla...
Sorry, did I read that correctly?
Tenure? In state-funded primary and secondary schools? In a country as brutally meritocratic as the US?
Tenure is meant to promote academic freedom and allow brilliant scientists with a proven track record to express potentially unpopular idea.
It's not meant as lifelong guaranteed employment for people who can't cut it in the real world.
Any idea that seniority should come ahead of ability is fucking bullshit anywhere, but especially when educating our youth. Japan does this, and it's a fucking basketcase. We are better than that.
if when you as parents fail to live up to your responsibilities the teacher can have your child permanently removed from class because they are there to teach and not babysit?
I had a teacher who used to turn up 20 minutes late to every lesson, teach for ten minutes and then do her own then for the rest of the lesson leaving the class to get on with it.
The entire class went to complain about her to both the head of maths and the school head. Absolutely nothing happened and she continued with her usual routine.
She wasn't even trying to do her job, but it seems the effectiveness, competence or dedication of a teacher can never be questioned.
I would love to know where the money is coming from.
It's easy to talk of "bad teachers" and say that unions keep them employed. But the truth is that "bad teachers" are the minority. Unions keep more "good teachers" employed at a livable wage than "bad teachers".
It is normal that the minority get the spotlight, just as it is normal that the Chihuahua barks the loudest.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Even as a casual observer, it is easy to see the broad problem is bad parenting and awful students. Sure, there will always be people in the bottom 10% of any profession; some teachers may need to be removed. My assertion is parents have more control over their child's education. It is their responsibility to ensure their kids are putting in the requisite time studying and preparing. It is every child's responsibility to at least strive to improve themselves.
You cannot legislate or litigate success in life for people who do not accept any responsibility to themselves.
Also, I have my suspicions this could also lead to more damage to unions. Unions -- on occasion -- can benefit society.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
They are both 2 big things that hurt schools and take away for things that are needed.
In asia they are very big on tech test and why should teachers be ranked on how good people are at test cramming?
College-for-all kills stuff that works better for some people like trades, career education, tech schools, and apprenticeships.
internships are some times tied to the old College system for jobs that are better set in an trades, career education, tech school settting.
us vets 20 million underserved https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7kBdguVSrC0AgARXNyoA?p=col.+%27robert+freniere%27&fr2=sb-top&fr=yfp-t-901
unsung is epidemic with us? world's local hero http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scott%20olsen&sm=3
That's a completely unbiased summary...
I am quite certain that it's not to break the back of "poor teachers", rather it is to provide a mechanism for removing the bad ones.
There are plenty of awful teachers that do not deserve to be "educating" people in Elementary, Middle, or High School, plus college. And the idea that anyone should have their job guaranteed is preposterous and the idea that teachers are always poor is even more pathetic, particularly given the summer vacation.
There are 365 days in a year (let's ignore leap years). Your average person works 52 weeks, given 2 or 3 weeks of vacation plus 1 week of holiday, giving 48 weeks worked. Of those 48 weeks, they are not generally working weekends, thus giving 48 week * 5 days / week, which is 240 days. Now, compare that to the average 180 day school year (generally not even 8 hour workdays), which will theoretically necessitate some extra work days--I'll generously say 20 full workdays (and ignore the fact that normal full time jobs also require similar behavior). In the best case, that's over a full month worked by the average person that the "poor" teacher does not face, and their job is not guaranteed with a non-401K based retirement as early as 20 years.
None of that is to say that there are not amazing teachers that easily deserve more than they are paid, but I am so tired of hearing about the teachers in general being underpaid. They're not; it's one of the best jobs that you can get without risk, particularly for the money given actual hours on the job and other benefits, and people are villainized for pointing it out.
Wake up.
PS: It's unclear with the Slashdot Beta how this will appear in terms of added whitespace, so hopefully these things aren't too far apart.
My experiences: each of my 3 kids encountered two completely ineffective/incompetent teachers in junior high and zero in elementary and high school (although we were aware of 1 in elementary that we fortunately did not have to deal with).
It wasn't that many but the level of incompetence was astounding and nothing could be done.
In higher ed, tenure is about academic freedom. In K-12 it's a misnomer. All that tenure means (and the technical name is continuing contract) for teachers is that the district has to follow due process to get rid of the louses. They can't just fire at will, which they can do if the teacher has a provisional contract. Admins simply have to do their job, but they tend to want to be buddies with the staff, or use their position to hire relatives, so quality goes to hell. That is not the union's fault; the admins just have to follow procedure and poof teacher-be-gone.
So many butt hole teachers out there, such crud!
Guessing this is going to end up like the comments from the story about the VC bitching and whining and crying Nazi. Hopefully provides just as many laughs.
Prison guards or border guards' union supported the Republican Party in the past...!
1. The subject is about children. Why are the Dark Money types standing in the shadows transmitting commands? Why does dark money hide from children?
2. Is there anything about computers or their use in the parent?
A little Googling indicates the prison guard union in CA gives twice as much to Democrats as Republicans, and spends much more than that on ballot initiatives.
complained twice about outrageously bad teachers.
One went into screaming rages periodically with 4th graders.
One sent kids outside in near-freezing windy weather in shorts and T-shirts, had ridiculously unfair grading, harassed us with idiotic requests (all documented btw)..
Nothing happened to them. They are both still teaching.
That's in CA btw..
> When you find ineffective teachers you also have ineffective administrators and schools boards.
Bullshit. The cases above were the consequence of teacher unions. Period. Administration agreed with us in both cases, but they could not do anything....
It pretty much takes a criminal charge against a teacher to get union to cooperate with administration.....
While some teachers are just plain incompetent or ignorant, that is not the only factor leading to poor performance. Here are several more: (a) teacher training is poor. Far too much time is devoted to topics like philosophy of education and social issues, too little to things like subject knowledge, normal and abnormal language acquisition, how to teach reading, and so forth. For example, I know of teacher education programs in which teachers, including those destine to be elementary school teachers, are not taught how to teach children to read, which is probably the single most important thing they do. In one case, as part of a seminar, the students read and discussed two papers on approaches to the teaching of reading; that was the entire extent of their training in how to teach reading! (b) excessive diversity of students is very difficult for a teacher to deal with. You only have the time and resources to individualize instruction so much. If the students are at very different levels, even a good teacher can't do a good job. The mainstreaming of students with disabilities has exacerbated this problem. I don't mean to suggest a return to rigid tracking or to dumping all special needs kids in separate classes or schools, but we need some combination of classes that are more homogeneous as to level and ability together with adequate support (in the form of teachers' aides and other resources) for special needs students. (c) school administrations and government departments of education often impose poor curricula and materials. Greater competence and less political interference in the education bureaucracy would be a boon.
Unreasonable hours and unreasonably low pay have been the norm in public education for decades.
If the unions did their job in public education, teachers would be working 40 hours a week and making at least 50K a year.
Work Safe Porn
I thought everyone else on here would feel like me, and that's that school was a goddamn bad and nefarious joke after the 6th grade or so. I muscled through it because I've always understood that you have to play by the rules to an extent, you have to do a certain number of things to keep the system satisfied with you or you'll lose out in some major way or another. EG, had I not graduated, it might have been a lot harder to get into the school I'm now attending. Still, though, the fact that all these educators who were such fucking rank-and-file, stick-close-to-curriculum (party line, that is, in Mass.) bullshitters earned such a great living doing it... it really opened my eyes to exactly how fucked this world is. I think the goal of the education system should be to get kids to want to seek knowledge on their own. Any teacher who doesn't do that is failing. All of the teachers in my school career who did that? They were way before high school. High school is a bad joke, I'm sorry. Elementary school is where the most money should be spent, if you ask me. And I think there should be a lot - a lot - more technology instruction at that level. I think kids who show aptitude in technology and science should be given the tools, no matter their background, to continue to succeed in those fields -- if it interests them enough to fill out these forms and do these steps. Later it leads to internships? Imagine if they had something like that when we were going to school, 20-somethings. Think of where we'd be.
Read an article a while back in LA weekly, like 10 pages about how impossible it was to fire bad teachers. I Don't remember exactly what this one middle school teacher said to a female student, but I remember thinking if I ever heard him say that to my niece, I would walk over and slug the guy. And that wasn't his first or last offense either, he was skeevy as hell. He continued to teach for months, and then got paid for YEARS TO do nothing.
Tenure in higher ed is about academic freedom. It's also as one economist has noted tied to demanding high production so that faculty often have to put off having families etc.
In K-12, tenure isn't about that at all. What people call tenure is just the demand that firing teachers happen through due process. Teachers can be fired. But there has to be a reason and documentation. Principals, often failed teachers, seem unable to act on the contract, so bad teachers slip through.
I say fuck that, the contract was immediately void because the contract imposed an obligation on unrepresented people (people that werent even born yet, in fact.)
"Ancestors always volunteer their descendants, for better or worse." - Frank Herbert
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
The problem is the double-edged sword of tenure. Remove the tenure protections and yeah, you get to fire those 10%. But in the meantime you've put those good 90% in the position where they have no job security and get watch their already low salaries stagnate relative to the rest of the economy, and they also need to worry about being fired for personal politics. A lot of those 90% are going to throw in the towel and walk out the door at some point.
So who will be left teaching your kids? Any recently graduated kid with a bachelor's degree who can pass the mirror test. And they'll stick around just long enough to A) get fired for complete and gross incompetence or B) get some experience and quickly move on to something else far more rewarding and lucrative. Oh sure, you might get a handful of golden souls who really give a damn and can suck up these crappy conditions because they are already retired from another profession or have a spouse who is making good money, but these folks are one in a million.
Tenure is a flawed system for sure. Bad people will look good just long enough to get tenure, then they will drag their feet until retirement, not caring a whit about anything. But that same tenure is a huge perk that the good 90% enjoy and desperately need for them to do what they do for the pay that they get.
Full disclosure - I am a tenure-track college professor and a member of my state teacher's union.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
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I'm not sure how to feel about this. Opening up teachers' continued employment to parents sounds like it could easily backfire--if Johnny refuses to do any homework or study and brings home an F, Johnny's parents are going to want to get rid of that teacher and bring in Ms. 'A's for Everyone!"
And the whole discussion about teaching metrics is America's biggest con. When we look at graduation rates, college attendance rates, SAT scores, whatever, we always find that urban schools, especially those with non-white students, are doing the worst--and we're supposed to pretend that those facts have nothing to do with each other. Politicians won't (or can't) just say what everyone knows is going on: that children being born into poverty, often in unstable families, and living within a crumbling urban infrastructure marked by constant violence just don't have the advantages that white kids in the 'burbs do. Instead, we get a lot of talk about 'holding teachers accountable', as if all the bad teachers merely happened to find themselves in urban schools by bizarre accident.
'Holding teachers accountable' through test scores is only going to make the problem worse, as teachers who might be willing to take a pay cut to teach in a dangerous inner city school to help make a difference can no longer afford to teach only poor students. Teaching anything but suburban kids is going to be career death.
On the other hand, though, every school has "that" teacher, the one whom both kids and parents alike hope they'll never have to meet. If the Sorting Hat puts your kid into one of those classes, that's a whole year wasted right there. I had a few of these.
My second grade teacher wasn't much for the "teaching" thing, and every morning we came in to find a stack of worksheets we needed to complete before the end of the day. If we didn't finish, she'd yell at us and we'd get a zero on anything not completed. I broke down crying more than once because there was just too much some days. Since the last worksheet was always TO COLOR, every day would end with the absurd image of children about to cry drawing in Mickey and Minnie as fast as possible. Yes, if we didn't finish coloring, we were told we got a zero. And yes, we were graded on those coloring sheets. Once parents noticed all the "S minus" graded coloring sheets being sent home, they got worried about what were equivalent to a C- bringing down their kids' grades, and kids started bringing art supplies in from home, because colored pencils and markers could occasionally merit the long-sought E- (equivalent to an A-, I guess.)
There was discussion among parents about doing something about this, but the administration clammed up about it, and I've always wondered how many kids she permanently ruined through stress and lack of an education. There are studies that show slightly older kids within a grade outperform their younger cohorts because of that extra amount of development, and that early edge keeps them permanently ahead of the curve, better prepared to leap to the next stage of the material; and what my second grade teacher was doing was setting back kids' reading and math levels an entire year, so they never caught up in 3rd, and they never caught up in 4th...
On the other hand, it's entirely possible she did her students an incredible service. I can't imagine too many of her students ever went for an art major, haunted by getting an N in coloring because "Pluto the dog is more yellow than brown."
When I was in Junior High a large group of parents protested to the Minister of Education that the school principal was basically insane. The Minister agreed, in that he was already aware of his nuttiness. He said, "We can't fire him but we are going to make him a useless Vice Principal (one of 13) at the giant high school." So he sat in a office doing nothing for a few years except trying to ruin the lives of whatever students rubbed him the wrong way.
So a couple of years later I am watching the national news and there is that same loser but now he is the Principal of the High School and has just finished squabbling with a student over french fries.
I was lucky that he never noticed me but when he targeted a student he would repeatedly call the police on them (odd in the Canadian system) and do his damnedest to make sure that their lives were destroyed. Months of detention (often overruled by the principal), plus encouraging teachers to "investigate" the students for any wrong doing. His favorite target seemed to be students from broken homes.
In my years from school and watching my daughters go through the system I have seen highly dysfunctional teachers who were embedded in the system like ticks. What makes it so much worse it that supremely fantastic teachers are not only beaten down by these losers who usually have tons of seniority but they are often chased out of the system by these parasites.
When you factor in the cost of living in CA, $70k doesn't go all that far....
But I digress. Six years ago, starting pay for a *full-time* high school teacher in my former home county of Brevard, FL, was $22k, with another $3k/yr bonus for a "high demand" science/math teacher. Since then, benefits, class sizes, and general conditions have only grown worse. The teachers I know (and I know many) routinely put in 10+ hour days, plus more weekends than not.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
I am working with some of these idiots and I hate it have to deal with them since they are so bad and so stupid but no one can touch them.
Vouchers that go with the kid. If the local government schools are doing a lousy job, let the parents take their kid and the money and go elsewhere. Competition to satisfy those customers and keep the money coming is the shortest and most effective path to reforming the system and keeping it reformed.
But I'm not sure I like the idea.
When I was in school we had a horrible teacher. That teacher had been there for years and everyone just accepted that on average students would get 4 or 5 out of 10 from that teacher.
Parents complained about it for years, but that was just the way it was.
Then we had this other teacher, for a different course, who was really good in my opinion.
But a couple of kids somehow managed to fail the course, and their parents made a big deal out of it and somehow they managed to get the teacher removed from the school.
So now we had one less good teacher, and we were still stuck with the asshole.
The moral of the story is that just because the parents (or even the childeren) think a teacher sucks, maybe not everyone thinks that, and you might be getting rid of good teachers.
Come on, California! All you children are concerned with is fornicating with one of their classmates after school. They are only being indoctrinated to tow the government line in school anyway. Forget bad teachers. You have kissed the ass of government for such a long time that they don't care about you or what you want or think. You as a parent (or parents if you decided to do it the right way) are insignificant when it comes to your children. You didn't care about raising them, so bad teachers are of no concern for you.
There should be a process which, yes, can lead to a teacher being fired.
Having worked in schools, I can tell you that there are many excellent teachers who are performing poorly because of the environment. Sometimes it is because the school is poorly managed. More often, it is because a given teacher is a poor fit for the school.
While it is possible to measure the outcomes from a teacher by various metrics, those metrics only measure outcomes. They rarely consider the social environment. When they do consider the social environment, they tend to do so from a negative perspective: by giving the teacher the benefit of the doubt based upon socioeconomic conditions. This sucks for the school because it reenforces lower standards.
What we should be doing is moving low performing teachers, or even average performing teachers, to different schools. After all, it would be terrible to dismiss an "average teacher" from a school with academically motivated students if that same teacher would raise the standards at a low performing school because they know how to motivate students who live in those communities. Likewise, it would suck to dismiss a teacher who crashed and burned at a low performing school when they know how to raise the bar for academically motivated students.
That said, if that teacher cannot perform well at any school that they are placed it, they certainly should be terminated.
Where is "-1 Moron" when you really need it?
It is NOT rare. 90% of teachers are competent and conscientious. But about 1 in 10 needs to go, and 1 in 10 is not "rare".
[citation needed]
I'm sure those 9 people suing have actual grounds to enter into the suit, right? For instance, each of them had a problem with a teacher that was wrongly kept on. Afterall, the courts only need to say that those policies are set by the school board and you have a right to elect whomever you want to the school board.
There's lots of laws and regulations people don't like, but tying up the courts isn't the answer. I would hope that if the suit is found to be frivolous that the CA Bar sanctions the attorneys involved.
Maybe if you actually applied yourself in school, you would have learned something when they covered paragraphs.
And if you had paid attention in life, you'd realize it's more honest to troll with a username.
When you factor in the cost of living in CA, $70k doesn't go all that far....
Maybe not, but it beats the median household income in California by about $10k source. And it beats the median 1-earner income by $20k.
If teachers make $22k in Brevard, FL, that's pretty tragic, but this lawsuit is about teachers in California, who can be well compensated, depending on the district they're in. Also, as the post you responded to pointed out they get extremely generous benefits. It's easy to disregard them as you did, but the pension contributions and lifetime medical benefits are unimaginably expensive.
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Wish I had mod points. I'd bump you up. It took me a little longer to understand how things were, but things never felt right in school... and my Mom was a teacher. You should hear her horror stories. To say that school is a "goddamn bad and nefarious joke" is an understatement, but there are no words in the English language to reflect how you and I really feel. I doubt any language can support that.
I just tell people now that I didn't let school get in the way of my education and when I got my bachelors from the university, I swore I'd never set foot in a school again. It is ironic that I recently had to go against what I swore to do and go back to school for six months to "keep the system satisfied [or] lose out in some major way" as you put it. My latest stint has only reinforced my belief that there are much better ways to educate.
I don't know how far "in the past" you're talking about, or where, but this article is about present day California. These days, the prison guard union donates twice as much to Democrats than they do to Republicans, and the Democrats show their appreciation.
The modern republican party was defined by Ronald Reagan . A former president of a California union, Reagan knew about what unions do behind closed doors and he is well known for union busting as a result. See for example the air traffic controllers. Unions, respecially government unions, basically stand for the opposite of what the modern republican party stands for. Republicans essentially believe that whoever works hard for something should get / keep what they worked for. The basic premise of any union is that it doesn't matter who works hard and who goofs off -everyone gets the same pay, the same benefits, etc. In the case of government unions, it ddoesn't even matter if you bother to SHOW up. If you've bee around long enough to have influence in the union they call that "tenure" and it makes you untouchable, no matter how bad you slack off. That's the opposite of what Republicans think is a good idea.
For teachers, this is really about being able to fire teachers with students who do poorly on standardized tests.
It is also about being able to fire teachers whose students do well on standardized tests but who have large salaries and can be replaced by much cheaper fresh graduates whose students might -- with a bit of luck -- do too poorly on standardized tests.
If you are against tenure, you are against the following: ... (3) due process, ...
(3) This story is in fact about due process at work. The people filing suit are against tenure and are using due process to fight it.
I really can't speak for California, but in the Northeast US ( Pensylvania and North ), Tenure == Due Process.
In my area, a new teacher ( 3years in some states, 5 in others) can be fired or "non-renewed" without a stated reason. In practice, new teachers are given good reviews mid-year and booted without comment or useful feedback. Such would-be teachers are almost unemployable after this, and the lack of feedback means that they can't work to address preceived flaws in case they do find a way to work again.
Experienced teachers can be dismissed for any legal reason. This is usually some combination of illegal activity (bank robbers can't be teachers usually), immoral behavior (porn stars are not encouraged to continue a teaching career), incompetence (yep, you can lose your job for incompetence), and insubordination (boss tells you to be on time, you aren't...). Of course, cause has to be documented. And except for the first two (illegal, immoral), a single incident is generally not sufficient grounds for action. This is good, a single parent complaint should not end a teacer's career.
The "problem" is that when ANYBODY is terminated for cause, their terminaion can be appealed in the state courts. This is not unique to teachers, but unions are in a good position financially to challenge these terminations, and so they do so nearly every time. Ex-employees of private firms generally cannot afford the legal fees to do this, and so generally don't challenge. The union provides the resources to access "due process".
The legal appeals process favors the district if the situation is well documented and if all of the rules were followed. The key to this is making sure that you have administrators with time to spend on process. A solid HR staff can help backstop this. Of course, the only thing that voters and unions agree on is that administration is a waste. And HR looks like more administration. Districts lose these cases a lot because administrators have other priorities and so don't do a great job with documentation or process.
In my current state, employees terminated for cause are not permitted to collect unemployment insurance. Private employers are more likely not to name a cause and accept the bump in their unemployment costs. This also tends to discourage lawsuits ( a bird in the hand...). School systems don't usually have this option with tenured (due process enabled) staff.
Big private companies tend to have the middle managment, HR types, and processes in place to cover themselves when they want to terminate for cause and contest unemployment. Small companies do not, but don't contest.
It's that simple.
THIS. This is about the bottom line. Find a way to fire expensive teachers legally, then replace them with younger, cheaper teachers. You know, for the children.
Students Matter, the group singing, is a front organization for a guy named David Welsh and his money. These aren't hardscrabble parents just trying to get a better education for their kids, its a Silicon Valley libertarian trying to bust unions for the sake of ideology.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Tenure and Unions. The 2 quackpoints of the anti-teacher crowd.
Unless my understanding is askew, you don't get tenure at all until you've managed to survive years on a more precarious footing than most jobs have. It's not something they hand you automatically on the first day on the job. The point is that after a certain period of time you'll have presumably proven your value and should be granted a respite from having to dodge bullets so that your (presumed) skills can be more fully applied to your actual job instead of just keeping the job. While some people would probably use this as an excuse to coast until retirement, it's more likely that if a person was dedicated enough to get that far, they're generally not going to be the coasting type. Unless the administration comes in and seriously de-motivates him/her. Which gets back to the point of tenure - desensitising the availability of key assets as the political winds blow to and fro. And one reason I don't work in academia myself is that the petty politics therein are so much nastier than in the business world.
One thing that has given tenure a bad name is that you can be a bad teacher and a good professor, if your primary value to the college is as a research associate (or for that matter, as a fund-raiser). That's not likely to be an issue in the lower levels of education, where they don't hire teachers for research purposes. Fund-raising could be a different matter if the charter crowd takes over, though.
: instructors to gain tenure and dismantle the 'last hired, first fired' policies that fail to consider teacher effectiveness
That would be great, if not for the fact that "teacher effectiveness" either means "how popular they are in the lunch room".
I've seen all the standardized testing BS. When the testing facility boasts that tests scores are improving, and then admit (when forced to) that they changed the test, I certainly don't want them responsible for hiring and firing.
So, I'm military, my wife is a teacher by trade, and my kids are in grade school. Some observations: Next door neighbors are teachers with his and her escalades and 3500 sq ft of house. Cut the "underpaid" bullshit.
But to the point, my older daughter has an absolutely shitty teacher. Doesn't care, doesn't try, doesn't teach, sleeps in class. My daughter and about 1/4 of her class are okay,because they have parents who are pilots and doctors and such and can afford to have mom stay home. The kids of the underemployed, however, don't have that. They just get screwed by the union that's preventing the fraud from being prosecuted. Why are the working poor paying triple in taxes of most states so that that fraud can keep her job and nice car. The principal is incapable of doing anything, and says that the union has threatened her job if she tryies again to fire her. Yes, the union can do that. The real problem here is that many of the poor kids are in her class because the rich parents organize to keep their kids out of her class. We PCS'ed in so we got stuck with the bad teacher.
Nothing you said about shitty parents is wrong though, just off topic. There are a lot of them.
The teachers will argue that this is largely, and in my view accurately, out of their control.
I've not worked in U.S. school districts. I've heard the pay there can be a lot worse, but I'd assume some other things are common. I have worked in several Canadian school districts (tech, not teaching), and I'd have to say that while there are definitely some teachers who can end up with a class composition that hinders education, there are still a notable number of teachers who are, frankly, not fit to teach. Most were older, and seemed to adopt the mantra of "countdown to retirement", enjoying the protection of seniority without providing any benefit from their "experience" to their classes.
Many of these staff members had the attitude of being there to teach but being completely unwilling to learn. This included teachers with incredibly poor core english skills (spelling/grammar/etc), as well as terrible technical and social skills. There were teachers who taught things that were out-of-date (as in, no longer correct), or just straight out wrong (never correct). These teachers generally refused to be corrected and punished those who pointed out their mistakes. Plenty of teachers also were catching cat-naps during class time. Their favorite response to a question was essentially RTFM as opposed to providing guidance.
Meanwhile, there are many other teachers (usually younger and female) who were pouring not only their professional time but also personal time and money into supporting classes. Unfortunately "Billy got a bad grade" isn't an adequate measure of a teacher, as the number of Billies may be simply a case of class composition, but teachers who go years with terrible feedback should be subject to some form of review process and/or have corrective measures enforced.
You've hit the nail on the head. There are some corporations (e.g. Pearson) that have been salivating over how much more money they could make from our educational system. The first step was to convince us that our current system was broken. The second step was to blame the teachers. The third step was to "convince" politicians (who have no educational background) that the business' solution of constant testing was the cure. They test in the beginning of the year and then they test at the end of the year and if the students don't do well enough, the teacher gets fired. No qualifiers such as said teacher's students are intelligent but don't do well on standardized tests. Or, since the test is very secret and not audited by a third party, that the test itself was flawed.
Of course, the corporations have a financial incentive for students to fail. Schools with failing students might buy more test prep books, sign up for teacher training sessions, administrator training sessions, or other goods/services the corporation provides. Schools with students doing well don't generate more corporate profits. In New York's first round of testing, only 31% of students passed.
Just to add insult to injury, New York has adopted a system called EngageNY which is essentially a script for the teacher to follow. It tells the teacher what to say, when, for how long, and in what manner. It literally is broken down into 10 minute segments instructing the teacher on just what to do during each. There is no leeway for teaching in a different manner that the teacher's students might understand better or for spending more/less time on subjects. Teachers are expected to teach according to the script. Of course, this makes teachers nothing but glorified actors who can be swapped out for other people at a moment's notice. (Think about every teacher who inspired you to learn and ask if that teacher was unconventional or sounded like they were robots reading a script.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
They will never win. The teachers union is too powerful. It's terrible, because most people recognize that this is a serious issue and our kids are suffering, but it will be a huge uphill battle that will take seriously reform to correct.
For teachers, this is really about being able to fire teachers with students who do poorly on standardized tests.
Hah, funny. No, its about Principals and parent groups being able to get teachers fired more easily, period. Sure some of those folks may be "bad teachers", but every single one of them is going to be a teacher a Principal, school board member, or random group of parents took a disliking to for some reason.
Think about this. Without any tenure, you are left with a profession that is supposed to judge (grade, control, etc) the progeny of folks who are capable of firing them on a whim. What exactly do you think is going to happen in that case? Do you think the kids of school board members will get a bad grade ever? How about a detention for misbehavior? Nope, they'll all be valedictorians.
In today's environment, where money=power, some rich folks feel like their money ought to be able to buy them complete control over their kids teachers. Tenure thwarts them (as designed), and they don't like it.
This is the same problem the Police unions have. Good ones protecting bad ones makes the good ones look bad. Yes unions protect teachers from unreasonable firings. They also protect bad teachers from legitimate termination, and the longer this goes on the more push back there will be. Then that dam breaks and radical changes happen like this proposed legislation. If teachers unions wanted to help themselves out, they need to come up with some effective means of purging legitimately bad teachers internally, or the public will do that for them and not in a way that efficient or even best for all parties be it the Teachers union or students.
I've noticed that it's pretty much fucked up everywhere, but the reasons it's fucked up vary greatly in different areas. While there are teacher's unions pretty much everywhere, they are either the main problem or they are the pawn of the main problem to serve as a distraction. Without delving into that too much, the universal problem in public education is money. Not a lack of money. Where the money goes is the problem. This also means that throwing money at the problem does not fix it and usually makes the problem worse.
In every public education system in this country, the main goal is to funnel off as much money as possible before it reaches the classroom. Whether this goes to fund grossly overbloated district administration systems that rival state governments, or to pad the pockets of union reps and teachers who get paid to not set foot in a classroom, the issue is the same. Huge systems set up to take a share of the money before it gets to the classroom. This isn't something that's easy to fix. Remember, the entire system is build around this, starting from the federal DOE down to the state boards of education, down to the school districts. Always assume that anything a district, or state board of education, or federal DOE does is to maximize the money kept for the people that are above the school level. The individual schools are the pawns in the game.
Regardless of who is controlling the game in CA, make no mistake, the purpose is to make more money for the people who don't set foot in a classroom and have no impact on child education.
The teachers or the people that consider all government workers their slaves?
The right recognized is 'equal protection', not about 'equal outcomes', so from the start the premise seems shaky.
Perhaps the argument is that the students with the tenured teachers aren't being given the same protections as students with non-tenured teachers.
A better approach may be disparate impact, i.e. the teacher dismissal process leads to a disparate impact to a protected group
That's hilariously sad, the juxtaposition of equal protection with something that is by definition unequal protection (some groups are protected, some are not). It's hard to believe, actually, when you see these principles next to each other with their contradictions blazing.
When you factor in the cost of living in CA, $70k doesn't go all that far....
Maybe not, but it beats the median household income in California by about $10k source. And it beats the median 1-earner income by $20k.
If teachers make $22k in Brevard, FL, that's pretty tragic, but this lawsuit is about teachers in California, who can be well compensated, depending on the district they're in. Also, as the post you responded to pointed out they get extremely generous benefits. It's easy to disregard them as you did, but the pension contributions and lifetime medical benefits are unimaginably expensive.
That's a bit disingenuous for multiple reasons. First, you are comparing an average to a median. Second, you are comparing salaries to median household income, not median income for people with a bachelor's or higher, a post-secondary credential, and no criminal offenses that would bar them from teaching.
Pulling from the original source, LAUSD's lowest offered salary was $39,788. That should be just enough money for a new teacher to afford a single bedroom apartment, unless they have to pay student loans or something... The average was ~$69k, and the highest $78k. In a place where modest 3-bedroom homes go for $400k or more.
Do you think initial CA teaching salaries are high enough to attract top talent? Good talent? Mediocre? Could your IT department attract good talent with salaries like that? It sounds more like the pay is low, and the only financial incentive to become a teacher is job stability. Which went away ca. 2009.
As for the benefits, I would agree. They are quite generous. But I would only favor cutting benefits and job stability if we boosted salaries drastically to make them competitive with the private sector. Real figures on total compensation would be far more useful in this discussion.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
That's well above the median pay in CA. Further, that $70 doesn't include benefits. Calculate that in and teachers are, in fact, doing VERY well in CA.
There was a time when working a "public" job meant taking lesser pay for greater benefits and retirement...
Starting pay for a teacher (requiring a 4 year degree AND licensing, mind you) is $32,000 out here.
how is that even remotely "better than fair"? A McDonald's shift supervisor makes that much. No degree required. no license required. You seriously think we should pay the people tasked with educating our children the same as the ones who make our fries?
Thank you for clarifying the accuracy of what I was thinking.
I don't have much experience with public K-12 tenure, but I did spend half my life in the university system. I know that university tenure takes ~6 years to earn, and has very rigorous reviews to reward it - the more prestigious the institution, generally, the more rigorous, because the goal is to maintain a faculty that the department can rely on for excellence and reputation.
It appears to me that K-12 tenure is automatically rewarded to anyone showing up for a couple years, which isn't a very efficient way of weeding out the lower quality individuals. It's hard to do reviews though, because the reputation of a department or school isn't rewarded in the same way; people choose their college, but very few people get to choose their public school.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte's challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther's plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn't didn't. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as 1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world's highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt's brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the exp
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Good!! Time to get rid of those liberals!! It is foolish to have people in jobs where they can not be fired and should be!!! democrats scream about fairness, but tenure IS NOT FAIR!!!
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The film begins by studying the Zero Tolerance policies in public schools in the 1990s, which were designed to eradicate drugs and weapons at schools. By arbitrary application of this policy via unchecked authority, soon nail clippers, key chains, and aspirin were considered dangerous and violations of the rules. This policy, combined with Columbine-inspired fear, has resulted in kindergartners being suspended for using pointed fingers as guns in games of cops and robbers and students being suspended for having Midol and Alka-Seltzer. This policy has turned schools into Kafka-esque nightmares, absurd and demoralizing. Increasingly, issues once dealt with by the guidance counselor or a trip to the principal's office are now handled by handcuffs and tasers in the hands of police.[1]
Students are denied basic constitutional rights. They can be searched, drug-tested, forced to incriminate themselves, and capriciously punished. Surveillance cameras, locker searches, and metal detectors are shown to be commonplace. Courts routinely uphold the school's right to do whatever they choose, creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, anger and despair. The physical structure of these institutions are themselves oppressive, resembling prisons in many ways, yet even more dreary.[2]
Ironically, the film shows that the drastic measures schools employ are ineffective as tools of protection. Security cameras did nothing more than film the Columbine massacre for news outlets. This oppressiveness does nothing to advance learning. Various teachers state on camera that this atmosphere is frustrating to work in, with all curriculum handed down from the state and that this "one-size-fits-all" approach doesn't work well with human beings.[3]
Even more harmful than this physical oppression is the use and abuse of psychiatric tools. The rampant diagnoses of ADD and similar conditions are shown to be intimately connected to pharmaceutical companies' promotional activities. The alleged disorder known as ODD - oppositional defiance disorder - is used to further control kids by serving as a gateway for further authoritative measures, often of the extreme kind.[3] Ritalin and other drugs are being over-prescribed. These strong drugs can have dire consequences, including suicide and murder. Some school shooters, including the Columbine killers, have used or been on these drugs.
This film touches on an area almost completely ignored in any discussion of education - the genesis of compulsory education. Public schools are modeled after a Prussian system, one geared towards creating compliant soldiers.[4] Later, it was modified during the industrial revolution to train people for the work force (hence the bells signaling movement).[5] Ultimately, the film argues that more money, smaller classrooms, better trained teachers and other bromides won't produce effective education because the problems are deep and institutional. In director Cevin Soling's words, "I was converted by teachers, by a number of people I interviewed is that the main mission of school is submission to authority."[5]
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Lots more links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Sad almost all the discussion here misses the deeper issue of compulsory schooling...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs."
Maybe also of interest: http://schoolsucksproject.com/
""In my 12 years of teaching, school sucks has been perhaps the most common phrase I've heard students use to describe their feelings about "public education" or more appropriately, compulsory schooling. Yet this seemingly bitter and reductive slogan is actually quite clever. School sucks is perhaps the most accurate and astute synopsis of the system I've ever heard. The 15,000-hour process of compulsory schooling has a dramatic effect on the mind of a child. When we first enter these institutions at age six, many of our best personal attributes are already in place. We are curious, innovative, unique, creative and hopeful in ways that we will rarely be able to replicate throughout the rest of our lives. But over time, school sucks those essential attributes out of too many of us...and replaces them with predictability, obedience and apathy. Unfortunately, for over a century this process has been referred to as "education." It isn't. Our aim is to reclaim that word, to take it back from those who wish to use institutionalized schools (at all levels) to mold impressionable minds into desirable and predictable finished products. Education is a journey by the individual, for the individual." -Brett"
See also my other posts in this discussion connecting to your points:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thank you for your insightful comment.
Cheap storage VM.